


Marriage a la Mode

by justsayshh



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Fluff, Gen, Jealousy, Light Angst, Marriage
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-26
Updated: 2016-06-16
Packaged: 2018-05-29 08:04:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,340
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6365944
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justsayshh/pseuds/justsayshh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Multi-chapter fic about Scully and Mulder realizing their feelings for each other. Starts during Season 3 when they meet Detective White (yeah, THAT episode), and I'm assuming it'll end up close to the reunion-era, but I have no idea. The only reason why it's rated T is there's a lot of swearing because I can't watch my damn mouth and there's a few mentions of sex, but I promise if I end up writing in sex it's going to be nowhere near the level of my other fics. Enjoy!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Detective White

**Author's Note:**

> I'm playing around with shifting POVs and I felt like the chapter was too short to have this chapter just be Scully's POV and then Mulder's POV the next chapter. Still working that out. I also don't really have a solid plot down for this yet, so I'm just gonna let Scully and Mulder do the talking. Disclaimer: I use a few direct quotes from the episodes, and obviously that is not my writing, but everything else is.

She wasn’t jealous. Scully didn’t do jealous. At least, that’s what she tried to convince herself as she paced back and forth in her dingy motel room. There was no way she was jealous of Detective White. Never in a million years would she be jealous of a bottle-blonde who had no idea how to do her job.  
“Detective White…Detective White is so great! I was just following up with Detective White,” Scully muttered under her breath, continuing to pace the floor. She knew she had sounded ridiculous earlier- telling Mulder to step out into the hallway, arguing like an old married couple- no, not a married couple. Old partners. That’s what Scully meant. “ ‘Someone is wearing my favorite perfume.’ The day I wear perfume for Fox Mulder is the day he buries me in my grave. There is no way I would wear perfume for stupid Fox Mulder.” Scully was seething. How dare he make her look like a desperate woman, throwing herself at him as if she couldn’t do better. Dana Scully could do way better than Fox Mulder, and that was a fact.   
“Well, except you don’t want anyone other than Fox Mulder,” that little voice in her head reminded her. Scully’s train of thought was interrupted with her phone ringing.  
“Dana Scully. Yep. Okay. Yes, we’ll be right over,” another incident, of course, but Scully was grateful for the interruption. She was not having yet another argument with herself over whether or not she was in love with her freaking partner. Grabbing her coat, Scully walked into the frigid night and over to Mulder’s room. Noticing it was open, she pushed her way in, walking right in on Mulder and Detective White making out on his bed, Mulder’s shirt open and Detective White’s hair tousled. Scully clenched her jaw. ‘You’re not jealous,’ she reminded herself.  
“Scully, this-” Mulder shoved Detective White off of him.  
“Save it. There’s been another incident,” Scully didn’t even wait for his response, just turned around and clicked her way to their car. She opened the passenger door first, out of habit, but decided she was going to drive for once.  
“Why are you driving?” Mulder asked, as soon as he and Detective White had made themselves presentable.  
“What, am I not allowed to drive for once? Do you always have to drive? Big macho man, always has to drive,” Scully spat out, clenching her jaw and turning to face the steering wheel.  
“No. I just didn’t realize your tiny feet could reach the pedals,” Mulder shot back. Shit. Scully had come off sounding just as defensive and irritated as she felt.  
“At least my feet aren’t so big I can walk around quietly.”  
“Well, Scully, you know what they say about guys with big feet.”  
“They have big egos?” Scully had just about had it with Mulder. Exasperated, he turned to Detective White.  
“Will you ride with her and I’ll drive your car?” he asked, but it came across as a direction. Much to Scully’s annoyance, Detective White slid into the passenger seat. Scully braced herself for the worst car ride of her life.  
Most of the car ride was silent on the way to the crime scene. Scully had nothing to say to this woman who had just waltzed in and distracted Mulder from their growing partnership. He had ditched Scully to go hang out with her, and Scully failed to see what was so special about Detective White. The silence was broken when Detective White turned to face Scully, and Scully could feel the detective’s eyes on her clenched jaw.  
“Yes?” Scully asked, a clear bite to her tone.  
“Listen…there’s nothing…there’s nothing going on. My cat was taken by those crazy Satanists. They killed my cat…I just needed some comfort, that’s all,” Detective White said mostly coherently. As a trained doctor, however, Scully noticed the slight slur in her words and the unmistakable stench of vodka coming off of her breath. Great. Mulder had been drinking AND having sex? Just great.  
“What Agent Mulder does is none of my business,” Scully swallowed.  
“Don’t think I don’t notice how you look at him. You two would be cute, you know. Too bad the FBI doesn’t allow fraternization.”  
“There are several married couples in our branch.”  
“Ooh, you want to marry him?” Now Scully had really done it.  
“No, that’s not…I just meant it’s not unheard of,” Scully turned to look at Detective White, who had a small grin beginning at the corners of her mouth.  
“You want to marry him,” Detective White repeated in a sing-songy voice. As if God was with Scully that day, they arrived at the crime scene. She had never been so glad to get out of a conversation before.  
Dana Scully did not want to marry Fox Mulder. Never. 

Mulder didn’t understand women. More specifically, he didn’t understand Dana Scully. He had tried, on numerous occasions, to flirt with her, and she clearly wasn’t interested. But the way she was acting around Detective White made him wonder if she was interested and he had misread her completely.  
He knew he was in deep trouble when she asked to speak with him privately out in the hallway, but if he was being honest with himself, he was amused and flattered that Scully was acting this jealous around another woman. They always talked about how they were strictly partners, or…friends. Really good friends, at most. With the way Scully had been acting lately, though, Mulder couldn’t help but think he wasn’t the only one in the partnership who felt something more. So, like the ass he was, he continued to flirt with Detective White just to watch Scully’s face turn almost as read as her hair. He would admit it was a dick move, but knowing that just being in the general vicinity of another woman was making Scully this jealous did wonders for his ego.  
Mulder really didn’t expect Detective White to come to his motel room around 10:00 PM, sobbing. He had had quite a bit more vodka than he had actually intended to, trying to forget how genuinely angry Scully was with him, meaning that he had almost no filter left when Detective White essentially threw herself at him, attacking his lips and unbuttoning his shirt faster than he ever would have thought possible. He wouldn’t mind having sex with Detective White, of course, she was a beautiful woman, but he couldn’t help but feel like she wasn’t the law-enforcement officer he wanted to be with at the moment. He tried to pry her off of him, tried to get her to realize he wasn’t up for it that night, but of course at the exact moment she managed to really plant one on him, Scully walked in.  
“Scully, this-” he tried to get out, shoving the detective off of him. Scully’s jaw was clenched and her blue eyes were simply hard-cut diamonds instead of the sparkly, loving eyes she usually had when addressing him. He knew he was in deep shit.  
“Save it. There’s been another incident,” Scully sounded pissed. Like really, really pissed. Mulder quickly buttoned up his shirt, listening to the clicks of her heels walk towards their car. In probably the jerkiest move of the century, Mulder picked a fight with her about driving.  
“You know what they say about guys with big feet,” he was angry at Scully now for being pissed with him. It wasn’t her right to control who he was screwing and what he did in his free time. She had no reason to be this mad at him.  
“They have big egos?” Damn. Scully was not playing around. Sighing and turning to Detective White, Mulder asked if she would go with Scully. Maybe Scully would be okay again if she could see that he really didn’t want to spend any extra time with the detective. They could have a girl chat or whatever and come out of the car best friends, or whatever the hell girls did when they were arguing. All hope of them making amends was lost when Mulder arrived at the crime scene and took one look at Scully’s face.  
He was screwed, and not in the way he wanted to be by Dana Scully.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Agh omg I'm so sorry this took forever I got super distracted with end-of-year work.  
> Anyway, I'm already 3/4 through season 4 and I cannot for the life of me really remember what the hell happens after the Detective White episode. (Okay, edit: just looked back through episode summaries and nothing MSR important really happens other than Scully going after the guy who killed her sister. Whatever. Never said this was going to follow the season timelines completely).

Mulder was never one to be jealous around women. But he had to admit, after the incident with Detective White, he noticed Scully was getting more and more flirtatious with other men. He wasn't even sure if she was really flirting, or if it seemed that way because he was constantly on edge around her now. About a day after Mulder finally decided to chalk it up to paranoia, he and Scully had an argument. Shocking. These days, it seemed that arguing was the only way to communicate.  
"What, do you have a date?" He asked, rather smugly, over the phone. He knew he was being a complete ass, but why Scully wouldn't just research the damn case like he asked her to was beyond him. She was never...well, he shouldn't say never this argumentative, but she always helped him in some way in the end. Mulder didn't want to show he was concerned over her recent lack of cooperation, so of course, he decided he would be just as uncooperative, especially now that he was away taking some 'Mulder Time.'  
"As a matter of fact, I do," Scully responded in a clipped tone that was becoming more and more frequent these days. Mulder tried not to let his heart sink into the pit of his stomach. Detective White was...was a fling, nothing more. But an actual date? That was serious business. As he had suspected, Scully wasn't romantically attracted to him. Her hormones must have had her on edge or something during the satanist case. Yeah, that was probably it.  
"Have fun," Mulder replied, hoping that he had more edge to his voice than regret or longing or something stupid like that. He hung up the phone without waiting for Scully to give him an exasperated sigh or another clipped insult. As soon as he returned to his hotel room, Mulder flopped on the bed, staring at the ceiling, and feeling very much like a hopeless teenager with unrequited feelings.

************

The next time Scully called him, Mulder was ready to be mostly civil again. Turns out he didn't need to worry about being civil.

'Come to the hospital, Mulder. I...I have a....a growth. Kind of...kind of in the middle of my forehead. Mulder...I have cancer.' The words were echoing in his mind like a nightmare stuck on repeat. He knew the other abductees had gotten cancer, but he never expected his Scully to follow their path. His Scully looked cancer straight in the eye and told it to fuck off. His Scully, his Scully, his...wait, 'HIS' Scully? Since when had she become his? 'Since the day you first saw her, idiot,' the small voice in the back of his head was telling him. He shrugged it off and decided to chalk it up to the overwhelming flood of sadness and anger and pain he was feeling at the moment. All Mulder knew was Scully needed him at the hospital, and he was going to make damn sure he would be wherever she wanted him.

Seeing Scully in the hospital was worse than Mulder could have ever imagined. She was...scared. Truly, properly, scared. He had only seen her like this back in the first few cases they had worked together, and then again when she had gotten abducted. This, however, was a new level of scared, he realized. The other times, Scully was scared because she was desperately grasping onto whatever scientific explanation she could fathom for what had happened. This time...the science was there. The facts were presented. And there was no hope of saving her.

*************

Finding a way to save Scully was the only thing that mattered. Mulder didn't care he if he wound up with a bullet in his leg (he hadn't- that guy was a crappy shot), he would do whatever he could to save Scully. So, when he found her bed empty after finding out her 'doctor' was in cahoots with the Cigarette Man, he panicked. Twirling wildly around the room to find some evidence as to where she had gone, he saw her journal. Normally, he wouldn't pry, but he noticed it was open to a page with his name on it. Several. Times. In her moment of thinking she would die, Scully thought of him. Mulder couldn't help but have his heart lift and the corners of his mouth tug themselves into a small smile, but he quickly shook himself out of it. Find Scully. Find her. Keep her safe. Those were the only words filling his mind, consuming every part of him.   
Find Scully. Find her. Keep her safe.  
Find Scully. Find her. Keep her safe.  
So when he saw her walking out of the room where he presumed her friend, her only hope in this battle, had died, he was relieved. Mulder desperately wanted to kiss her. To kiss her and communicate he would never leave her side, ever, that he had found her journal, that even though she never said anything explicitly, Mulder loved her too. Instead, he settled for comforting her, knowing it wasn't the time or place. Though his brain kept saying 'kiss her, you dumbass' he was perfectly content with touching his lips to her forehead, then feeling her collapse into his body. He felt his lips touch her red hair, which suddenly seemed less bright, but he needed to know she was safe. He needed to know she knew she was safe. When she told him she wanted to fight, he saw a glimmer of his Scully return.  
So he just held her tighter, knowing he would never let go, regardless of how she felt about him.


End file.
